A couple of weeks back I took a trip over the Forth to Stirlingshire and the coalbed methane company Dart Energy. I was shown around by general manager Douglas Bain and he has some pretty interesting stories to tell.
The process of developing coalbed methane in the area has been ongoing for many years now. In 2004 a local entrepreneur with a background in coal started drilling for gas, and latterly another company had taken on the task. Neither could make the process economic. In 2011, however, the licence passed into the hands of Dart Energy, a coalbed methane specialist, who have found a way to extract the gas profitably. CBM involves drilling along a coal seam and then pumping water out to reduce the pressure to the point at which the gas flows. Dart's breakthrough was simply to pump the water out through a second, vertical well, which intersects with the horizontal one. No fracking is currently involved and, according to Bain, nor is it likely to be in the future, because the narrowness of the coal seams involved mean that fracking is unlikely to be economic.
;)
With gas flow rates now favourable, a pilot production facility has been set up, with the gas sent to an on-site generator, from where it supplies direct to the grid electricity sufficient for several hundred homes.
The pilot plant is shown in the image here (click for full size). It's pretty small-scale stuff and in truth even then the impression is misleading because the site also incorporates the generation equipment and a wastewater treatment plant.
A production wellhead would look more like what is shown in the second image on the right.
So with 14 wells drilled and the technology honed to the point at which extraction became profitable, the company applied for planning permission to start drilling production wells, the intention being to connect these direct to the gas grid, which passes close by the site.
But this plan reckoned without the intentions of the greens. Despite an incident-free operations history, despite electricity having been generated without incident, despite Dart being a local business, putting money into the hands of local people, a major campaign was launched to try to prevent any further development of the site.
The details of the campaign are instructional. The approach adopted by Friends of the Earth, Frack Off et al appear to have been based on a strategy of "fib like fury". So we had Dr Mariann Lloyd-Smith (PhD in law!) claiming that Dart were dumping "extraordinary" levels of benzene into the Firth of Forth. The idea that the regulator would allow such a thing is pretty absurd and in fact the levels were almost low enough to pass drinking water standards, let alone levels for industrial effluent.
Then there was the Frack Off's claim that fracking had been ongoing at Airth for years without any of the operators telling anyone. Was this a case of Frack Off putting the record straight? Well, "not quite" seems to be the answer. It appears that the original operator of the site had tried to frack once, but hadn't been able to get gas to flow at economic rates. As far as I can tell their attempt didn't result in contamination of water supplies, no earthquakes were reported, and the world didn't actually end. Nobody seems to have tried again since and, as noted above, it is unlikely that anyone ever will.
And what about Friends of the Earth's claim that Dart had told the Australian Stock Exchange that they planned to frack, while telling residents in Airth that they weren't?
Commenting on the revelation that Dart Energy has told the Australian Stock Exchange that they plan to use the controversial fracking technique while telling communities and planning officials in Scotland that they have no plans to exploit shale gas, Friends of the Earth Scotland Campaigns Co-ordinator Mary Church said:
"Dart Energy needs to be straight with the public and its shareholders about its plans to frack for shale gas in the central belt. What they are saying to the local community and what their company reports say to shareholders doesn't add up."
It turns out that Dart had been describing its shale assets to the stock exchange. As readers at BH know, shale has to be fracked to get the gas to flow; CBM doesn't. Dart had therefore been telling the truth to everyone. This must have been obvious to anyone who glanced at the details for even a second, so the conduct of FoE's Mary Church is quite extraordinarily blatant. (But apparently not so blatant that a green journalist like Rob Edwards at the Herald would feel that he should explain the misrepresentation to his readers.)
I could carry on in this vein for a while - as I explained above, Douglas Bain had some amazing stories to tell. But perhaps I'll save some of these up for another day.
In the meantime, let us just consider the nature of green activism in this country and wonder just what goes on in these people's heads. How do they actually manage to sleep at night?